The Patience of Machines

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They have no crew.
No bridge.
No voice but the slow turning of their engines and the patient hum of their reactors.
Yet for a hundred millennia, they have crossed the void with the devotion of pilgrims
on a forgotten road.

The elder civilizations call them Cathedrals—
vast, autonomous star-structures forged by a species long since folded into dust.
Where berserker machines once carried extinction, these carry genesis.
They wander the spiral arms seeking silence, emptiness, unclaimed worlds,
and the faintest chemical breath where life could be coaxed into being.

Inside each Cathedral, sealed behind armor older than empires,
lies a treasury of seeds, spores, encoded genomes, and dormant ecologies—
entire biospheres held in trust.
Each machine is a vault, a womb, a traveling sermon in metal form,
executing a directive written by hands no longer alive to witness its promise.

When a Cathedral reaches a world chosen by its ancient heuristics—
gravity gentle, atmosphere possible, oceans dreaming beneath cloud—
it opens like a mechanical flower.
Lightning arcs from its crown.
Biological filaments unfurl.
Viridescent nanospore lattices drift into the storm belts,
preparing soil and sea for futures they will never see.

Their patience is infinite.
Their mission is singular.

Civilizations rise, wage war, and fall again in the eons between each of their stops,
but the Cathedrals continue their journey unchanged—
luminous monks wandering the celestial dark,
spreading the liturgy of life where none existed before.

To some cultures they are angels.
To others, omens.
To a rare few, relics of the Builders—
the vanished makers who understood that the greatest monument is not stone or glory,
but the persistence of life long after its creators fade.

And somewhere in the clouds beneath them,
a dead planet stirs with the first impossible spark,
fulfilling a promise older than stars:

Life travels, too.